When the volunteer firefighters of West got the call, they knew what they had to do. What they didn't know was that the next 30 minutes would change their brotherhood forever.

By DAVID TARRANT and SARAH MERVOSH
Staff WritersPublished August 18,2013

He sat alone in the dark, the tip of his Marlboro glowing red with burning ash.

After the fire and the explosion and the mushrooming black cloud that spread over the town like a shroud, C.J. Gillaspie found himself in his office. It was the one place in all of West where he could be alone.

It was several hours after he and the other firefighters had responded to the most dangerous call of their lives. Gillaspie didn’t want to see anyone. He didn’t want to talk, or explain what he’d seen.

Gillaspie, who is West’s public works director and a captain in the fire department, had been a commander at the scene of the fire at West Fertilizer Co. that night.

He thought about the men who were like brothers, volunteers who made up West’s fire department. Its 30 members include the town’s constable, a pharmacist, repairmen, city employees and insurance salesmen. Across Texas, 8 in 10 fire departments are volunteer.

Each of West’s firefighters wears a pager. When the dispatcher calls, they drop whatever they’re doing. And they go. Most of the calls are for brush fires. Sometimes it’s a two-car crash on a back country road at 3 a.m. Whatever it is, they show up — without pay — to keep their town safe.

Because somebody’s got to do it.

In a town of 2,800 residents, that’s the way it is. Their mantra of self-reliance — somebody’s got to do it — runs as deep in West as its Czech roots. Since the late 1880s, when Czechs began settling this part of Central Texas, neighbors have been helping build one another’s homes. They attend birthday parties, backyard barbecues or just meet for a pivo — a Shiner Bock or a Bud Light.

So, in the early evening of April 17, when the dispatcher delivered the news that the fertilizer plant was on fire, the men didn’t hesitate.

Gillaspie and the other firefighters, adrenaline surging, raced to the north end of town, toward a blaze like nothing they had ever trained for. They said they weren’t fully aware of the dangers of the plant and the chemicals stored within.

The Dallas Morning News interviewed more than 20 first responders, including nearly a dozen West firefighters and medical personnel who were on scene before the explosion. Many spoke publicly for the first time, revealing the risks they faced and the horrors they experienced that night.

Eddie Hykel was one of the first firefighters on the scene and like many others was injured.

The evening had started quietly — a time for church services, athletic events and other social gatherings. Gillaspie stopped at Bud’s Tiger Stop, the Exxon station just a few blocks from his office.

After work, folks often unwind in the back of the convenience store, where a few tables and chairs are set up on the black-and-white tiled floor. A big cooler filled with ice and beer advertises 16-ounce cans of Miller Lite for $1.50. An antelope head on the wall collects dust.

Gillaspie sat at one of the round tables, sipping a Bud Light. At 32, his waist was thickening a bit. But his broad shoulders and muscular arms helped define who he was: a former tight end for his high school football team who grew up in nearby Abbott. He loved to hunt and fish, wrestle with his kids and work with his hands. He used his vacation time to help friends bring in the harvest.

He had become an unlikely leader in the fire department. Younger than most firefighters, he seemed more comfortable sitting in the back at meetings — distracted, wisecracking, head down on his arms. But he’d keep one ear open, ready to speak up or pass on a technique, perhaps something he learned at Texas A&M’s firefighter training school.

That night at the Exxon station, he got together with two fellow firefighters: Doug Snokhous, 50, a captain with a reputation as one of the fastest to respond to fire calls, and Cody Dragoo, 50, plant foreman at West Fertilizer Co.

They planned to grab a few beers, then head out to prepare a nearby dirt track for an upcoming tractor pull, one of several fundraisers the volunteer firefighters put on each year to supplement the $4,643 they get from the city.

Gillaspie hadn’t finished his first Bud Light before his pager pulsed. It was 7:32 p.m. After a series of high-pitched beeps, the dispatcher alerted them to a structure fire at the fertilizer plant.

Gillaspie turned to Dragoo. “That’s your damn building, not mine. Go have fun with it,” he teased. But Dragoo was already sprinting toward the door. Gillaspie and Snokhous walked outside to get in their pickups.

They saw the black smoke coiling in the sky and hurried to the station.

Answering the call

All over town, firefighters began to respond. Some were eating supper; others were watching TV or working in their yards.

Robby Payne, 51, president of West’s only funeral home, was at home. Tall and lean, Payne still had the bearing of the Baylor University track and field star he’d been three decades earlier.

After a weekend golf trip with two other firefighters, Payne had forgotten to turn his pager back on. He heard about the fire when his father-in-law called and alerted him.

“I’m headed that way,” Payne told him.

Payne kept his fire gear at home. He took a couple of minutes to pull on his thick boots, protective pants, coat, helmet and gloves.

At the station, George Nors, 68, the fire chief, was seated at his wooden desk. He’d stopped in only five minutes earlier to catch up on administrative work.

The chief had lived in small farming towns around Central Texas nearly all his life, except for a few years in the mid-1960s, when he enlisted in the Marines. He served in the Vietnam War, hauling supplies through the jungle in convoys of 18-wheelers. The convoys were often ambushed.

After returning home, he took a job with West’s public works department and stayed for 39 years, eventually becoming director. After he retired, he took over as fire chief two years ago. He spent his time playing with his grandchildren or hanging around the fire station — his “other family,” as his wife liked to say.

When the fire call came in, Nors walked into the garage, where the department’s five firetrucks were parked. He wrote a message for the others on the white board: Fire, West Fertilizer Plant.

Doug Snokhous, who had raced over to the station with Gillaspie, was joined by his younger brother, Bob, 48. The two lived near each other, worked together at a Waco steel plant and seemed inseparable.

Morris Bridges, a newer member in the department, showed up, too. The 41-year-old had hugged his 2-year-old son goodbye before dashing to the station.

Joey Pustejovsky, 29, also arrived. The city secretary was a beloved figure in town — West’s go-to guy. Between city business, fire calls and cigarette breaks, he and Gillaspie had grown close — so much so that Gillaspie was in Pustejovsky’s wedding the year before.

One of the Snokhous boys got into the white truck used for brush fires. Pustejovsky jumped in the driver’s seat of the red-and-white engine, the one Gillaspie usually drove. Gillaspie hopped into another engine, the red one they called “Nick” in honor of the late son of West Mayor Tommy Muska, a fellow firefighter.

The chief activated the citywide alarm system near the white board. Once, twice, three times he flipped the switch. Each time the howl of the emergency siren rang out across the town — a signal to all residents of a structure fire.

About 7:35 p.m., the first three trucks rolled out of the station.

One after another, they zoomed past City Hall and turned right on Oak Street, into the town square. They passed The Village Bakery and Mynars Bar on the corner.

Inside Mynars Bar was Kenneth Matus, 51. He and his cousin, Jimmy Matus, worked at a company in town that built firetrucks, including some of West’s. After exchanging a call, the men agreed to meet at the plant to offer technical and service support.

They wouldn’t be the only civilians to show up to help.

Robby Payne stands near the spot where he landed after he was thrown 30 feet by the blast.

As they raced toward West Fertilizer Co., the firefighters had no established plan. They would just do what they always did: Show up, begin fighting the fire, then reassess.

Pustejovsky and the Snokhous brothers tended to be the front-line warriors. They usually arrived first and flung themselves into the fight. According to one oft-told story, the Snokhouses once came straight from the golf course and charged into a blaze without their bunker gear, burning the soles off their shoes.

Others, like the chief, were more likely to hang back, consult and offer direction.

That’s the way it worked that night, too. At 7:38 p.m., the first wave — Pustejovsky, the Snokhouses and others — joined Dragoo, the plant foreman, who had come straight from the Exxon station.

The firefighters parked on either side of a burning warehouse, one of several buildings at the site. Using the water in their trucks, they tried to douse the fire that was growing stronger by the minute.

There was no fire hydrant at the fertilizer plant. Gillaspie drove “Nick” to the nearby high school, about 500 yards away, to hook up a hose to the red fire hydrant on the corner. He wheeled the firetruck through an empty field toward the massive fire. Already, its flames were shooting through the warehouse’s door and roof, making a thundering sound like stampeding cattle.

At 7:41 p.m., Gillaspie called for backup.

When Chief Nors got there about 7:45 p.m., he checked in with his assistant chief, Emanuel Mitchell, who had arrived in his own vehicle. The two of them were worried about the smoke blowing northwest over a residential area.

They were even more worried about the numerous tanks of anhydrous ammonia stored at the plant.

Anhydrous ammonia is a fertilizer kept under pressure in liquid form. If it leaks into the air, it becomes a potentially lethal gas. Over the years, the fire department had been called out several times when pop-off safety valves leaked.

Nors and Mitchell talked about the need to start evacuating a nursing home, apartment complex and houses near West Fertilizer Co.

But nobody was thinking about the possibility of a catastrophic explosion.

The firefighters knew in general terms that the plant also stored ammonium nitrate — but that wasn’t a cause for apprehension, they thought.

Ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer ingredient whose pellets look like a fat grain of rice, is commonly used on farms around the region. But the fertilizer was never flagged as a danger at fire department meetings or local emergency response round tables.

The firefighters had always heard ammonium nitrate was a stable chemical. They said they didn’t know how explosive it became at high temperatures.

West’s firefighters had never trained on fighting a fire at the plant, except for a walk-through years before. On-site training wasn’t emphasized in West, partly because of money and partly because there was no mandate to do so. There are no minimum training requirements for volunteer firefighters in Texas.

A breakdown in communication among federal, state and local planners also helped keep the town’s firefighters in the dark about the chemical’s danger.

So when the firefighters converged on the plant — Gillaspie charging across the field on “Nick,” Payne arriving in his wife’s Ford Expedition, and the chief bringing up the rear in the tanker — none of the men was thinking about an explosion.

But the 28 to 34 tons of fertilizer sitting in wooden bins in the plant’s seed room were growing hotter, and more volatile, by the minute.

First warning

The first warning of danger came when Gillaspie drove in on “Nick.” He told those battling the blaze to back up. The fire was too intense. They were too close.

Gillaspie left “Nick” down by the fire. He took off in another truck, intending to hook it up to the same hydrant by the high school and push more water back to the firefighters.

Payne, the funeral director, also stopped to talk with the men fighting the fire on the south end of the warehouse. He cut across the yard to the north end, where another truck was located. Second only to the chief in years of experience in the department, he planned to tell anyone near that truck to back up while they figured out what to do next.

Nors arrived in only a T-shirt, jeans, a ball cap and boots. He usually didn’t wear his fire gear, since his job was to stay back and direct. But even 50 yards away, he felt the extreme heat of the fire.

After talking with the assistant chief about evacuating residents, Nors walked up closer to the fire to consult with Dragoo, the plant foreman. Dragoo thought that the fire was too big to extinguish, that they should let it burn out.

So, by about 7:50 p.m., about 12 minutes after the first crew had arrived, the firefighters had agreed on a plan: Back off from the fire and evacuate nearby residents.

But other first responders were still pouring in. Emergency medical personnel had already arrived for backup. Four firefighters from neighboring departments who had been attending an EMT training class in West responded to the call. They sprinted toward the fire. An off-duty Dallas firefighter rushed over from a nearby cookout.

Kenneth Matus saw Dragoo talking on a cellphone and his cousin Jimmy taking a video. Kenneth heard loud popping and crackling noises. It looked like the warehouse was about to collapse. He moved around to the passenger side of “Nick,” the side farthest from the flames.

Somebody — probably the assistant chief — urged everyone to back up. They needed to move fast. The firefighters started picking up their hoses. One of the Snokhous brothers got behind the wheel of “Nick,” but in his hurry forgot to disengage the pump as he put the truck in gear, causing the gears to grind loudly.

Then, as if some invisible fuse had burned down, the fire became a bomb. The blast gave off an earsplitting crack, followed by a sonic boom. Flames and smoke rocketed hundreds of feet into the air.

It was 7:51 p.m., just 13 minutes after the first firefighters had arrived on scene.

Andy Bartee/Special to The Dallas Morning News

Smoke from the blast could be seen for miles.

The explosion created a crater 93 feet wide and 10 feet deep and knocked over residents standing in their yards a half-mile away. The U.S. Geological Survey registered the force of the blast as a 2.1 magnitude earthquake.

A cloud of smoke swallowed the plant. Dust and debris rained down on the first responders, men and women who had just come out to help.

Bloody and wounded, survivors crawled or stumbled away from the epicenter. The smell of ammonia burned in the air. Small fires littered the grounds. Tires popped. Fuel tanks ruptured.

Payne was blown out of his rubber boots. He went flying backward, landing 30 feet away. He lost his helmet. His jacket ripped apart. He landed unconscious, slumped against a barrel-shaped tank that held liquid cattle feed. The molasses-like fluid oozed over him on impact, matting his hair and coating his body.

Brad Wines, whose father is a firefighter and one of Payne’s closest friends, raced to the scene looking for his dad. He found Payne instead.

Wines hollered and shook him. Payne woke up and felt a sharp pain in his right shoulder and chest. As Wines helped him to his feet, Payne repeated the same question: “Where am I? What happened?”

Chief Nors heard the blast before he felt it. He woke up with gravel all over his head, as if someone had rubbed his face all over the ground. He lost his glasses and his hearing aids. Blood seeped from his left ear.

Another firefighter had been hit by a railroad cross tie. He ignored his injuries to help the chief over to the tanker. The blast had riddled the back of the chief’s legs with debris. He had bruises and swelling on his legs, back and shoulders.

Still, Nors forced himself to get up and trudged toward the high school.

Gillaspie had just arrived at the fire hydrant near the high school when the plant exploded. A blast of hot air knocked him to the ground.

Lying on his back, he noticed that the foot-tall grass in the pasture was flattened.

“What the hell? What the hell?” another firefighter screamed.

Gillaspie scrambled to his feet and ran back toward the plant.

He remembered that a call had been sent out for reinforcements. He grabbed his radio and hollered at the dispatcher. “Nobody needs to be coming down here,” he shouted. “We don’t know if something else is fixing to blow.”

As he ran, he choked on the billowing smoke and dust. He saw Nors stumbling toward him. Gillaspie told him that ambulances were on the way. He wasn’t sure if the chief heard him.

Gillaspie caught sight of Mitchell, who is black. He was covered in dust — “as white as me,” Gillaspie recalled. Mitchell, crying, said he had warned the firefighters to pull back.

“I told them not to be up there,” he said. “I told them. I told them.”

Gillaspie looked down at the ground and saw Kenneth Matus on a stretcher, waiting for an ambulance. Matus was likely the closest to the explosion to survive. The truck had shielded him from the worst of the blast, but it ripped his clothes off. Only his left sleeve and collar were left.

Gillaspie kept moving. He picked his way around the twisted metal and burning ember. The blast had shoved “Nick,” the fire engine, back about 10 feet. Its blown-out side panels hung like broken wings.

He hoped he might still find a firefighter alive, perhaps pinned under debris. But he saw no more survivors — only the remains of friends beyond help.

“I started to see things I didn’t want to see,” he recalled. “So I turned around and walked out.”

Chief George Nors, a Vietnam veteran, found himself in a battle he could not win.

At sunrise, authorities had a preliminary understanding of what had been lost. Eventually, the numbers would stagger them.

Fifteen people killed — 12 first responders and three civilians. At least 300 injured. An apartment complex, nursing home, three schools and hundreds of homes were damaged or destroyed beyond repair.

Property damage was estimated at $100 million.

Over the next two weeks, the people of West and nearby communities came together to bury their dead. These included five of West’s firefighters: Joey Pustejovsky, Cody Dragoo, Morris Bridges, and Bob and Doug Snokhous.

The four firefighters from nearby towns who left the training class in West to rush to the fire were killed: Kevin Sanders, Perry Calvin, Cyrus Reed and Jerry Chapman.

Three other first responders also died: Capt. Kenneth “Luckey” Harris Jr., the Dallas firefighter; Buck Uptmor, who owned a fence-building business and died trying to rescue horses from a corral near the fire; and Jimmy Matus, who came to offer technical support for the firetrucks he’d helped build.

Funerals took place nearly every day. Most were held at St. Mary’s, the big Catholic church in town. Mourners crammed into pews, shoulder to shoulder, while an overflow crowd stood in the back or outside.

Nors, his left arm in a sling, attended every funeral. Robby Payne, hospitalized for almost two weeks, got permission from his doctors to attend the memorial service at Baylor University, where President Barack Obama spoke.

Aderhold Funeral Home, which Payne runs with his older brother, handled the memorial services and burials for many of those who died. That number of services would have put an incredible strain on any small-town funeral home. It was even worse for Aderhold because Payne’s injuries and recovery left him unable to work for months.

By mid-June, Payne was limping around his office in a boot cast. He had torn ligaments and tendons in his left ankle.

Most of his injuries, though, were on his right side, where his body had smashed against the tank. He suffered major nerve and muscle damage from his right elbow to his shoulder. He also had broken bones on the right side of his face, several chipped teeth and a broken ear drum, which would require surgery.

He remembers little of what happened in the minutes just before and after the explosion. He ended up at Hillcrest Hospital in Waco and didn’t hear about the deaths until two days later, when a fellow firefighter broke the news.

His body is healing faster than his psyche. “I’ll lay down every night and cry,” Payne said. “It’s devastating to lose so many at one time.”

Finding refuge

Chief Nors has found refuge in his family. His home was heavily damaged by the blast. He and his wife, Fran, are living with their daughter, her husband and their three kids. His son, who filled in as chief while he was injured, and his other daughter visit often.

The blast triggered traumatic memories from Nors’ time in Vietnam.

After the war, he had nightmares. He was so jumpy that he once knocked Fran down when she approached from behind to give him a tender squeeze.

Back then, he received no counseling or therapy. The military didn’t formally recognize post-traumatic stress as a medical diagnosis until the 1980s.

After the explosion, the nightmares returned. His sleep was restless. As Nors rebuilt his home, the bang of a falling board could reflexively send him to the ground. This time around, though, Nors said he got some counseling. He learned that the more he opens up, the less he dwells on losing the firefighters he thought of as sons.

Early on, though, the onslaught of media coverage caused Nors and other firefighters to retreat in silence. For months, a “No Press” sign hung from the fire station doors. The firefighters needed time to heal, and it was hard to do so in public.

Mayor Tommy Muska became a de facto department spokesman. He handled most questions, like how much the firefighters knew about the plant and about autopsy reports that showed two firefighters had violated the department’s policy by responding with elevated blood alcohol levels that night.

“They went there to protect the town,” Muska told The News earlier this month. “In my opinion, they are still heroes. In my opinion, they used their best judgment.”

Nors did say that it’s important to do more training. “You can’t really ever train enough,” he said.

Nors has slowly returned to the fire station, wearing his familiar Vietnam veteran baseball caps, driving his 1982 powder blue Ford F150 with a U.S. Marine Corps sticker on one window and a West Volunteer Fire Department sticker on the other. He and his wife spend nearly every day helping the workers who are rebuilding their house.

Mona Reeder/Staff photographer

These days, George Nors takes joy in playing with his grandchildren.

But what calms Nors most is spending time with his grandchildren.

He likes to watch them play in their sandbox, push them on swings or take them for rides in his golf cart. Andrew likes to sleep on cushions next to them in the living room at night, while Nors and his wife — Papa and Mimi — sleep on the recliners. Katie, the littlest one, is silly and makes her grandfather laugh. And every morning, she insists on helping him put on his socks and shoes.

“That’s what keeps me going,” Nors said of his grandkids. “They just make me happy.”

C.J.’s long walk

On that Wednesday night, after surviving the explosion only to find his friends’ bodies, Gillaspie walked around town in a daze.

He saw the destroyed apartment complex and nursing home and the houses burning on Reagan Street. People ran past him looking for loved ones. Others pushed nursing home residents in wheelchairs toward the football field.

He kept walking until he got to his house, a few blocks west of the fertilizer plant. The house was destroyed, but he was relieved to find that his wife and two kids were safe.

He sent his family to a relative’s house. Then he headed to his office near the town square, about a mile away. He had stripped down to his yellow firefighter pants and a T-shirt. Every few minutes, someone pulled alongside him to offer a ride. He kept walking.

Inside his office, he sat down at the desk and lit one cigarette after another, listening to the sirens from all the backup fire departments and ambulances that came to help West that night. He couldn’t cry.

In the weeks that followed, he attended funeral after funeral. At Joey Pustejovsky’s, he presented his friend’s firefighter helmet to the family.

“Just gotta be strong,” he told himself. “Just gotta be strong.”

He’s reluctant to second-guess the firefighters’ actions the night of the explosion. The volunteers did the best they could.

“You have a fire of that magnitude, your adrenaline’s rushing. You’re not thinking about this thing exploding,” he said. “You’re not thinking about how much ammonium nitrate is in there. Or what’s in there that’s combustible. … You don’t think about any of that.”

But he said more training would have helped. It might have given them more information and a better understanding of what they were up against.

Two-thirds of West’s fire department had or were in the process of getting the basic certification recommended by the State Firemen’s and Fire Marshals’ Association. But beyond drills and practicing on equipment, Gillaspie would like to see the West volunteers train at every big business and school in the town.

“You’ve got to do this stuff once a year so it stays halfway fresh in your mind,” he said. “You do it every 10 years, well, hell, you ain’t gonna remember none of it.”

As West’s public works director, Gillaspie has logged grueling hours at work as he helps oversee just about everything associated with rebuilding West. He also has fire department and City Council meetings to attend. He has his house to rebuild. His phone rings constantly. He has no time for what he loves, like spending time with his kids — 5-year-old Ethan and 2-year-old Anslee.

He suspects the trauma will probably catch up to him at some point. “We’ve had people come through here who want to sit down and talk to us,” he said. “Therapists.”

He finds distractions instead: another cigarette break, a drink with his buddies, a country music concert.

But every building permit that crosses his desk is a reminder of the damage the explosion inflicted. Every day, he thinks about how he used to walk across the street to City Hall to chat with his friend Joey Pustejovsky. Every night, he returns to a tiny rent house instead of his home.

He wishes he hadn’t seen what he saw after the explosion, but he can’t turn back the clock. What he can do is help rebuild West. It won’t be the same as it was. But he’s a doer and a builder, and the only thing he can do is to keep doing and building.

A few weeks ago, his home was bulldozed. He bought the lot next door, and is going to rebuild bigger and better — four bedrooms, three baths.

“Gotta get a new house built,” he said.

He reached for his pack of Marlboros and headed out the door to a spot of grass in the shade.

This narrative is based on two months of reporting and interviews with 11 eyewitnesses on the scene before the explosion. The News also interviewed firefighters and authorities who responded after the explosion, as well as civilians who saw and were affected by the blast. These interviews were supplemented by investigation results, obituaries, autopsy reports, video footage from that night, before-and-after photos of the fertilizer plant and other documents.